From: hallam@w3.org
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 1995 01:18:18 +0800
To: Bill Stewart <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Crypto & Taxes [WAS Re: Cybersecurity]
In-Reply-To: <199511030524.VAA03406@ix5.ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <9511031621.AA11770@zorch.w3.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>>Hold on.  This is more "factoid" than "fact":  recall that income is PAID 
>>by people as well as EARNED by people.  Most payers have easily 
>>detectible physical presence and assets that can easily be attached by 
>>regulators.   It will be a cold day before, e.g., my employer agrees not 
>>to report my earnings.  And the same is true for most employers in most 
>>industries.  

>Unfortunately, this is true, at least for people whose employers are
>subject to income tax somewhere.  Taxing businesses doesn't make sense
>economically - you could collect almost as much money with far less disruption
>to the underlying economy by taxing it as wages for workers and

Why unfortunately? I happen to consider that our modern social ecconomy
is a high point of civilisation. It is certainly a tremendous achievement.
We can educate the entire population, provide them with health care,
prevent famine and provide protection against crime and agression by
other states. All in all rather a good deal.

While one might wish to personally avoid paying taxes there are no benefits if 
everyone avoids paying taxes. There are significant areas of the ecconomy
which can only be funded through social mandates, roads for example.
While there are fringe political elements who put forward alternative models
I find them no more convincing than the claims of the Marxists who made
similarly ideologically based assertions not so long ago. There have at 
least been examples of Marxist states, even though they were not particularly
successful and rapidly degenerated into dictatorships.


I find the libertopian obsession with government oppression and complete
indifference towards coporate exploitation unsatisfactory. The truth is
that both are inevitablty interlinked. For the "libertarian" it is 
unsatisfactory for the government to exploit consumers of utilities but
entirely satisfactory for corporations to do so should they have the chance.
The theoretical possiblity of competition making this acceptable even
where there is no actual competition and hence no choice. This 
corprativist model accepts supression of freedom provided it is to
commercial goals.

Consider the linkage between direct mail advertising and surveilance. It
is unecconomic for a government to trace the movements of every citizen.
The communist countries were brought down as much by the cost of the huge
surveilace administrations they constructed as anything else. In the
West we do not have government surveilance, we have direct mail marketers
do the job for government. Surveilance is made ecconomic by getting the
citizen to subsidise it. It is naturally open for the government to apply
information collected by these people for their own purposes. It is a 
salable commodity and the government is a willing buyer. Furthermore there
is a sophisticated infrastructure in place to achieve these ends.

The extent of corporate surveillance goes unnoticed by most citizens. Few
people realise that when they use their credit card in a supermarket they
are supplying a direct mail marketing company with a profile of their
spending paterns. They are also providing a statement of where they are,
and indirectly their income, residence etc.

What is needed is stringent data protection laws which enforce the 
confidentiality of personal information. Note that both the SEPP and
STT payments systems conceal the credit card number from the merchant.
Cryptographic locks on individual parts of the picture are insufficient 
however. What is needed is laws which make the financing of the 
underlying architecture unecconomic.

		Phill